Crazy Taxi was quite a thing, huh? Screaming down the streets, aimed like an unstoppable whaling harpoon at a Taco Bell that just had to be on the other side of town. Ahh, the memories. Collateral looks nothing like that. If anything, I’d say it probably has more in common with Bruce Willis at the beginning of The Fifth Element. Flying cybercars, crazy hover police chases, the constant, erupting feeling that you are Bruce Willis nothing can stop you – the whole shebang. OK, maybe not that last one, but it’s what I plan to think while playing. It’s an open-world cyberpunk taxi sim with a faction system, customization, and a vibrantly disgusting art style. What’s not to like?

Oh right, the main character is named Zack Edgewater. Welp, they can’t all be winners. Still though, there’s a lot to get your mouth (or mechanically chattering lip enhancements) watering and your gums (or vita-gel-infused oral cavity socket protectors) flapping here. For instance:

“Navigate your way through the sprawling, cyberpunk dystopia of ‘New Bedlam’, a bustling neon city populated by hoodlums, riffraff and genetically modified mutants. This chaotic, futuristic urban landscape makes Collateral a visually loaded, eye-gasmic experience. New Bedlam is a large, open world environment consisting of several sectors, each with a distinct aesthetic and unique landmarks. Explore areas such as China Town, the Industrial Zone and the Redlight district.”

AND

“Collateral features a standing system, allowing you to form allegiances and rivalries with the factions and corporations of New Bedlam. Each faction has inherent advantages, such as access to special weapons unique to that faction, as well as cumulative rewards, like unlocking new city districts when enough favour has been gained. Complete missions to earn the respect of your favourite factions, and blow enemy factions out of the sky.”

So you explore, race, and battle your way through the neon bulb labyrinth of a city’s un-streets, and all the while you make choices both large and small that have lasting consequences – for instance, entire portions of the city being destroyed. Also interesting: your hover car isn’t stuck on a single plane. It’s a vertical world, so chases can go up, down, and all around. I could see that becoming joyously chaotic in a heartbeat.

Certainly, Collateral looks a little janky at the moment, but it’s far from finished. As of now, it’s halfway through a Kickstarter campaign – both in terms of time and funds pledged. With a goal of just $15,000, it’s definitely got a chance to go the distance. Toss a few pennies (or holographic, natural-language-enabled mini-portraits of your favorite leaders) into its tip jar, perhaps?

I played the demo of that game when it came on a PCGamer disc with the magazine, and I’ve spent the last 13 years trying to remeber the name of it! Words can not describe how happy I am that you made this reference.

Oh man! Watching the trailer made me think of Quarantine! It was so long ago since I played I had completely forgotten the name, however. All I remembered was “There was this game where you drove a taxi and could mount a chaingun on it…” Awesome!

Aw, dang, I immediately thought of Quarantine too. They had clearly spent literally tens of dollars on that amazing FMV intro. “In other news, fires continue to rage across the lower east side, so if you live downtown, wake up…’cause you’re on fire.”

I think I got stuck on a bit in the…third or fourth zone where you’re supposed to “deliver” a bomb to an offending structure, only the delivery point is in the middle of a building and can’t be reached from any side. Fiddled with it for a few hours and then gave up.

Oh man. I loved Quarantine, and I loved a demo of a flying-car-racing-game that I played in the late 90’s and can’t remember the name of. In theory, this looks like something I’d love to play, but the execution? I dunno, there’s something off about the movement of the cab. It looks too jerky, like it’s being controlled with the mouse and will be able to spin 180 degrees at the flick of your wrist. It doesn’t look like the cab has any sense of weight to it. (That’s not a pun. Don’t even think about starting a pun thread.)

I think the game you’re thinking of from the late 90’s is B-Hunter. A completely awsome for it’s time “3rd person” perspective bounty hunter in the future shooter with, shock horror a half decent story line to go with it. Bonkers control scheme to start off however, though if one stuck with it they became like anything else, second nature. I’ve recently tried running the little gem on Win8 and unfortunately it’s not as I remember it and doesn’t support widescreen sadly.

B-Hunter! That was it. Was driving me crazy. I think I got the whole thing free off the front of a magazine – even though I enjoyed the demo, for some reason it got pretty mediocre reviews, so it tanked.

B-hunter was one of my all-time favorite games. The flight mechanics were just amazing once you get used to it. I played that demo so long I become extremely fluid with the controls. Used to time myself racing the tunnel highway, race the train and get as close as possible without malfunctioning, try to blow up every bridge, elevator and statue before the time ran out (Demo had a 15 min limit or once you reached the second area). It took me 2 years to find a boxed copy but it was so worth is. I am really sad that I cant get the game to work anymore. It starts just fine in software mode but as soon as something dies, it falls through the terrain and the game crashes. The atmosfear was also great and the weapons! Oh god the weapons. The homing missiles in this game is just nuts. Incoming!
Oh and it even had multiplayer!

When that came out for the C64 I had a friend who refused to pronounce it as it was probably intended and insisted he vocalise it as a grunt. We went as far as to dare him to ask the woman at the counter in the shop if they had the game in yet. I’m not sure if he did it, I think we ran out giggling or something. We were only about 10. I only ever played the demo though.

This has made me want to replay New York Raceso badly. It was a great little hovercar racer, not open world of course, but considering how long ago it came out (2001 – sweet lord, was it really that long?) I think it holds up quite well. The handling and movement were certainly a lot better looking in NYR – that taxi in Collateral looks a tad like a flying brick.

I had the chance to play this at Pax Aus – and it was pretty fun. I just played one mission sort of thing though. Picked up a mission, followed an arrow to kill someone, went to the end of the mission.

They pitched that you could go up and down with “easy altitude controls.” But they didn’t do it any of the videos I’ve seen, and if you look down you don’t see a whole lot going on below you in terms of traffic or geometry. So…….yeah.

I didn’t see any either, although there are other cars that are clearly in different planes. It is kind of weird. My guess is that there is vertical navigation, but not as much as it looks like, e.g. that green mist is a hard floor and there’s a hard ceiling to prevent you flying over the rooftops instead of dodging skyscrapers.

Yes, there is vertical movement and you’re pretty close on the limitations. There are “soft” limits to vertical movement that pull you back if you go too high or too low. In-game, we call it the “Hover grid”, or at least we will when we explain it a bit more in the future. If you could fly over every building it would make the game too easy, but you can fly over some of the lower buildings. I’ll most likely be doing a gameplay video update soon to show off things like vertical movement and a few other features, so stay tuned.

Also: When I was reading this article I thought for a moment that it was Cara, but checked and it wasn’t. This is like the fifth time this has happened since she became a Regular. I remember someone saying that she was being processed into the hivemind, but I think she’s doing that thing Mandy did to the giant alien brain in that episode of Billy & Mandy with the song by Voltaire.